WINNING ENTRY - IFRTD OPINIONS FAIR (March 2007)

Rural Infrastructure Maintenance
By Joaquín Caraballo

It is absolutely crucial to insist on the importance of road maintenance in guaranteeing adequate rural transport services and in looking after infrastructure. Roadways must be well maintained, according to both technical and economic standards. Unfortunately the rural roadways in question are generally low quality dirt roads and sufficient resources do not exist to keep them in good condition for traffic all year round, particularly during the rainy season. This article concentrates on some strategies for making good roadway maintenance economically viable.

We present our strategic position below and based on experience conclude that it is important to achieve rural mobility or accessibility (albeit at low speed) rather than to achieve fast operational velocities, with the result that the main issues to be addressed are those that are critical for achieving an adequate movement of vehicles and people. In our opinion, these issues are:

1. The width of the roadway.
The maintenance costs of roadways are directly related to their width. In general, roadways are built with a width of six metres or more based on engineering criteria which dictate that large vehicles must be able to travel along them without impediment, something which happens only a few times a day on a tertiary roadway. If one counts the seconds taken by two large trucks to pass each other, the total time of the encounter is only a tiny part of the day’s duration. On the other hand, in rural areas of developing economies, around 80% to 90% of freight and passengers are carried by non motorised means or intermediate transport vehicles (These can be bicycles, tricycles, small motorbikes which carry various passengers, people who travel on foot or in carts pulled by animals, amongst others), so that these constitute the majority of users. 

Over terrain where there are many rural roadways, there is substantial deformation of the platform over time, owing to the fact that it has hardly been stabilised. So it is that the wider the road, the greater its deterioration tends to be, due also to the fact that puddles and channels form on the road surface which ultimately damage great stretches of it.

Taking into consideration that the whole road network has to be maintained, the proposal is to analyse how convenient it might be to increase the width of the roadway by stages, building just one lane or two tracks initially. As and when other resources are made available, it will be possible to go on widening the road, making the investment economically viable. 

2. Maintenance techniques with mechanical equipment and the use of manual labour.
When maintenance is carried out with mechanical equipment such as a motorised leveller or a bulldozer with a mechanical digger, the operator generally cuts into the embankment or hillside at the edge of the roadway in order to form the drainage ditch and in doing this, takes the resulting loose or soft matter from the side and places it in the centre of the road making it easier to level. In reality however, this material disintegrates and is washed away by the first rains, leaving the roadways in a poor state. If this drainage maintenance were carried out manually and with the aim of not using the material produced, better results would be obtained in roadway maintenance.

Moreover, if an intensive labour scheme is used, it is possible to increase the participation of human resources substantially (up to 40 – 50% in many cases), making it possible to achieve good roadway maintenance with a high social impact and reducing the economic costs of maintenance. 


3. Preventative maintenance practices of residents or users living along the roadway.
The usual practice with respect to rural roadway maintenance is that the authorities or government is expected to maintain the roads, so that very often when deterioration begins, timely or appropriate action is not taken in the expectation/hope that the government’s road gangs might appear. If we can manage to change this mentality and local users are trained and enabled to do preventative maintenance, they might carry out small or simple actions to prevent the roads deteriorating; the costs of rehabilitation and maintaining the roads in better conditions can be avoided thereby facilitating rural transport.

4. Roadway Improvements in order to reduce maintenance costs

In order to reduce maintenance costs and as a subsequent stage in the process of consolidating the roadway, the proposal is to stabilise the road’s critical components. In many cases it has been considered appropriate to opt for a strategy of paving these areas (the tracks or lane) with blocks or stones, in order to improve mobility conditions for pedestrians and people travelling by non motorised means of transport, the most important from a social point of view. Furthermore, travelling conditions for motor vehicles are substantially improved given that they can get one set of tyres on the paved area and the other on the unpaved part or can get both sets of tyres on the two paved lanes.

Roadways paved with blocks or stones allow one to work in stages, as much across the width as along the length of the roadway. Moreover, it is possible to set up small contracts based on sectional plans in such a way that it is possible to work on many fronts, thereby shortening the project preparation cycle. Simultaneously working on many fronts implies huge positive political repercussions, which means that this proposed strategy must be able to rely on the approval of the politicians.  

This opinion piece was contributed by Joaquín Caraballo, Bogotá, Colombia.
Contact: caraballo.joaquin[at gmail.com

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